


One Replicated Chocolate Sundae

by juniperpines



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 12:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1688345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperpines/pseuds/juniperpines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Almost as good as the real thing.  S2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Replicated Chocolate Sundae

Troi’s love for chocolate is legendary to the point of absurdity -- Riker once caught a pair of servers at the end of the bar mimicking her orgasmic sighs -- so it’s impressive that he can pinpoint the first time he saw her communing with a sundae.

It's not on Betazed, but during one of the first years they work together on the ship that he wanders through ten-forward on one of his late night walks. He takes them when he can’t sleep and has begun to think of them as a watch, making sure the corridors are ship-shape and that anyone left in the lounge has company, or at least the chance to turn it down.

One night he sees her sitting by herself at the bar, a shoulder hunched forward protectively, a spoon in her hand, and decides this policy applies to ex-lovers, too. Her hair cascades down over her shoulders from its high clasp. It makes her look impossibly youthful now that it has escaped the severe bun, which he is pretty sure was for his benefit. “Can I join you?”

She looks up, surprised, which always makes him feel like he has won something, managing to sneak up on Deanna. “Of course.” As he sits, though, the little victory is washed over with a funny feeling. He doesn’t have much of a sense of her anymore. ( _The untended garden soon grows fallow,_ he can hear Lwaxana sighing, judging.) Occasionally a sense of otherness tingles at the back of his mind, like half-remembered music or the perfume of someone who left the room before he came in. He doesn’t have the tools to make sense of it, but he knows these fragments belong to her.

This is bolder, though, and headily familiar. The best he can do is earth flowers; Deanna’s desire is like gardenias and magnolia blossoms, fresh and sweet and rich.

He's afraid this is the awkwardness they’ve tried to avoid this past year, that they know each other too well or might find themselves feeling too much. Her startled eyes, though, tell him what his unskilled senses can’t, that the rush of want that flows in and ebbs back out has very little to do with him. 

It’s a little death to his ego, hardly the first where she’s concerned. Somehow it makes it more inviting to sit down, to hook a heel on the rung of the barstool. Deanna gathers herself and straightens her posture, carefully sealing away her garden variety sexual frustration.

That’s when he notices the sundae. It’s a decadent creation, a small pyramid of balls of rich chocolate ice cream, already half gone. The dish must be climate-controlled because the ice cream doesn’t seem inclined to melt. She has been working on it for a while already, but from the size of it, he doesn’t believe she has any chance of conquering it.

“Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“Surely you’ve had chocolate ice cream before.”

He has to think back. The replicator substitutes keep getting better and better, but they still don’t taste quite right when it comes to some of these less nutritionally sound indulgences, so he rarely does indulge. Besides, it’s not his vice. “Not since I left Earth.”

She smiles knowingly. “It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s awfully close.”

“And where did you learn about the real thing? I never knew you to have a sweet tooth.”

“At my first real posting after I finished my studies.” With the edge of the spoon’s bowl, she shaves a thin layer of ice cream while she talks, a sheet that ripples into a ribbon. “Did I ever tell you about that?”

No, he thinks, they haven’t talked at all about those years. She knows that as well as he does. He shakes his head, watching her manipulate the ice cream and lift it to her lips to savor before she continues.

“I was assigned to a Federation disaster response team based on Starbase 14, as part of a group of psychologists. Whenever anything happened in the nearby sectors, we were on call. It was difficult, and they rotated us through quickly so we wouldn’t burn out, but it was good training. It’s the only time I’ve reported directly to another psychologist since finishing my residency on Betazed, and by happenstance it was to another Betazoid, a captain. She took me under her wing while I was there.”

“She was the ice cream fiend?”

“No, she was all about her orchid collection.” Deanna smiles at the memory. “She collected them from all over the quadrant. Her quarters were filled with epiphytes, and she would bribe the starbase botanist with samples to tend to them when we were called away. The first week I was there, she invited me to tea in her quarters to see them, and told me I needed to start collecting my own. She didn’t mean it literally, but she had been in the psychological service long enough to know that people needed to find an outlet, or else it starts to interfere with their work. She was especially concerned for me as an empath, that I might be prone to burn out. One of the other lieutenants and I started a ritual of decompressing over ice cream after we returned from missions.”

“And obviously it stuck.”

She crinkles her nose, in that way she’s not sure if she likes his teasing. She scoops up a frosty bite in the spoon and lifts it, gesturing towards his mouth. He raises an eyebrow and meets her halfway. She’s right. It is good, better than he was expecting.

“Guinan has her own replicator files,” she shares, lowering her voice like this is secret knowledge, and offers him the spoon.

He takes it from her and helps himself to another mouthful. He will note in the future that he doesn’t see her indulging in ice cream after stressful away missions or difficult weeks processing the constant churn of every one else’s feelings, that it’s much more common to feel that fluttering sublimation from her when she orders something dark and rich. He never does figure out what or who drove her to her own form of therapy that night. But he will remember, with the cold taste of chocolate on his tongue, the moment when he first believed they were going to be friends.


End file.
